Alive at the End of the World

Dearest readers,

I’m writing to you from the balcony at Land’s End Inn, the aptly-named hotel next to Sean and Rebecca’s house that overlooks the sea. I’ve been up since sunrise, and I sit here now watching the tide slowly roll in and buzzing with the hum of too much free coffee at the breakfast buffet.

Yesterday was Rebecca’s book launch event, which saw her in conversation with Provincetown’s legendary Billy Hough. Interviewing people live is a talent, and Billy has it, and he was able to touch on every aspect of the book without giving too much away or relying on Rebecca to do too much close reading. He brought out the best in my best friend, and the air in the old barn crackled with everyone’s delight as we watched them light each other up.

Rebecca is great at writing characters, and one by one, the people that star on her written pages filtered out of the room in real life, sharing snacks and champagne to celebrate her. It’s a remarkable thing, to watch a book come to life. It’s a far more remarkable thing to participate in the thing itself. Memoir is funny like that - there are always going to be people captured in print who are living and breathing and engaging with each other in real life. Standing on the porch outside the bar with plastic cups of bubbly, we all started to create what might be Rebecca’s next story, because the lives we all live intertwine and intersect and, perhaps most importantly, revolve around her.

We capped off the day the only way we know how: With a chaotic, indulgent meal at Daniil’s house. I did what I do best (throw my credit card in the general direction of cheese and booze), Joe did what he does best (disappearing for half an hour and coming back with copious amounts of side dishes), Adam did what he does best (chopping things and having a nice butt), and Daniil did what he does best (stoking a fire, grilling things, and making mysterious use of a rock) in order to bring together a meal that fed almost a dozen of us. Daniil’s house is so familiar to us all that it’s an actual character in Rebecca’s book: I only come to Provincetown once or twice a year, and I’ve had at least twenty dinners around that fire myself.

One of the central themes of Rebecca’s book - and in turn, her life - is the staunch refusal to live even one moment inauthentically. For her, this means she must exist as a self-proclaimed “voluptuary,” a lover of all sensory details. Her book is a tribute to food and to the great meals she’s shared with so many of us, but it’s also about all the ways in which feelings show up in our everyday lives: Through sex, through snacks, through heartbreak. She feels her feelings deeply, and in reading her book, she forces you not to look away from your own lest you miss out on a single moment. 

I arrived in town on Friday with my heart feeling a bit messy and raw, the melancholy of caught feelings mixing with the melancholy that sets in whenever I set foot on a ferry, for some fucking reason. I’m not an outward-emotions person in the physical sense: I may write you a long, long letter about my feelings, but I rarely cry. This week, I burst into tears two days in a row, once after nearly adopting a ten-year-old dog who could barely walk and once after reading aloud the paragraph in Rebecca’s book about me. I was worried, as I started rolling my suitcase down the pier, that I was going to tarnish a celebratory weekend with a bit too much wallowing. But then the inevitable happened: Joe and Adam pulled up to pick us up, I got to the edge of the world and this balcony and this town full of fucking insane creative weirdos, and my heart set itself to rights again because it is a corny and very real truth that when you are surrounded by people who love you, you’re always home. And now we get to have that memorialized in a perfect series of essays from the woman who brought us all together.

If you’ve ever fallen in love with a meal, if you’ve ever fallen in love with a person who broke open your heart in the best way or the worst way, if you’ve ever discovered a kink you didn’t know you had or you’ve lost a parent or you’ve had an ill-advised encounter with pantry ingredients as a child, this book is for you. And if none of those things have happened to you or you can’t relate, maybe this book is also for you, because maybe you need your heart broken open so you can feel your feelings.

I’ll leave you with a paragraph from Rebecca’s book, about this place that so often brings us all together from various corners of the northeast:

“I’ve been thinking about how Provincetown has so frequently been a place to weather storms. The dune shacks served as safe havens for shipwrecked sailors. There are houses lining Commercial Street that hid people on their way to the next segment of the Underground Railroad. There have been hundreds of texts written about the comparative respite people found here during the AIDS crisis. Once I started thinking along those lines, it became impossible to miss just how many people come here after completely uprooting their lives and abandoning everything they’ve known to figure out who they are and how to live as that whole person.

It’s goofy, but I guess I didn’t realize that we were doing that too.”

You can buy Simmering: A Kitchen Memoir, now in its second printing, from the wonderful folks at Unbound Edition press.